Embedded Systems

Embedded systems are special-purpose computers built into devices not generally considered to be computers. For example, the computers in vehicles, wireless sensors, medical
devices, wearable fitness devices, and smartphones are embedded systems. The embedded systems
market is growing 50% faster than that for general-purpose
computing.

Designing embedded systems is a huge challenge because they have so many
requirements: they often need to be tiny, high-performance, inexpensive,
reliable, and last a long time on poor power sources, all while sensing
and influencing their surroundings. Computer
engineering research in this area covers the entire “stack,” from
transistors and circuits to operating system and applications.